Retirees` Group Seeks New Image

November 11, 1990|By Larry Lipman, Cox News Service.

WASHINGTON — After years of battling for improved health care benefits for older Americans, the American Association of Retired Persons, the nation`s largest group of its kind, is trying to change its image to that of a volunteer organization stressing education.

``AARP should not be looked upon as a bunch of old folks who are only interested in their own good fortune and their own means of working together to achieve economic ends,`` said association President Robert Maxwell.

``I would like to dispel the idea that we`re a selfish group of self-interested people and that we are folk who are not interested in others,``

Maxwell said. ``I`m just as interested in seeing my grandchildren have comfortable lives and that they . . . be well-educated.``

Maxwell, a retired insurance company officer from Maryville, Tenn., took over the two-year presidency of the 32 million-member association in June and has been stressing the need for older Americans to take a more active role in educating both the nation`s youth and elderly citizens.

He is concerned by reports that America`s youth are ill-prepared to meet the demands of the work place and are falling behind their foreign

contemporaries, particularly the Japanese.

He is also concerned about projections that the 22 million new jobs expected to be created in America during the coming decade cannot be filled simply by those graduating from high school. That offers the opportunity for some older Americans to return to the work place, but Maxwell said many either are illiterate or need new job skills such as using computers.

Since taking office, Maxwell has appointed task forces to devise better ways for volunteers to help in schools and in one-on-one literacy programs among their peers.

AARP has about 400,000 volunteers who help older Americans learn to read, prepare tax returns and work as school aides, but Maxwell said he thinks that number can be greatly expanded.

``AARP is sort of back into the education business. We`ve never gotten out of it, but I think it`s sort of taken a back seat in terms of our public image of advocacy on behalf of older people,`` he said.

The association plans to stress programs such as ``adopt a school,`` in which an AARP chapter helps students in a particular school. Another program is ``grandparenting,`` in which a retired person acts as a surrogate grandparent to a classroom.

The AARP chapter in New Rochelle, Conn., has established a homework center for ``latchkey children`` who come home after school to an empty house. At the center, volunteers, some of them retired teachers, are available to help students with their homework.

One impediment to older Americans helping in schools, Maxwell said, is resistance among teachers and principals who see the volunteers as intruders. But other systems welcome the help. Montgomery County, Md., for example, has about 32,000 school volunteers, not all of them older, who contribute an estimated $6 million worth of services a year, Maxwell said.

Some AARP chapters have established teacher aide training programs to prepare volunteers for serving in the classroom.

In addition to stressing the need to help educate America`s youth and elderly, Maxwell said the association will continue to urge its members to support public education.

He said that the elderly have frequently-and sometimes wrongly-been accused of voting against bond proposals and higher tax rates aimed at improving public schools.

``Older people realize they have to support, not fight, education,`` he said. ``It`s turned around. They have been awakened.``